Girl, 11, driven to suicide by fear of school

Terrified at the prospect of going back to school, an 11-year-old girl of Maruleng cattlepost near Sehithwa village in the North West chose to take her own life instead.

According to the police, the child, a Standard Two pupil at Kuke Primary School, hanged herself from a tree on Monday afternoon.

It seems she panicked after mistakenly believing that the social worker approaching her mother’s yard was coming to take her back to school.

In fact the social worker was conducting needs assessment in the area.

“Apparently she hated school and when she saw the social services department vehicle, she thought the social worker had come to take her to school and she ran away,” explained officer commanding for Police District 5, Peter Gochela.

The girl fled into the nearby bush. Her body was later discovered hanging from a tree.

“She had used a piece of blanket lining to tie her neck to the tree,” added Gochela sadly.

Kuke Primary, a boarding school for rural community children in Gantsi, has a history of high dropout rates amongst both male and female students.

The issue of dropouts in the Gantsi area has long been a cause of concern with the problem even being raised in parliament.

In 2017, the then Minister of Education and Skills Development, Thato Kwerepe revealed that in Gantsi North 250 learners had dropped out of school that year alone.

Kwerepe said that to mitigate the problem, the ministry worked with communities, social services department and parents to raise awareness.

Additionally, one of the strategies used was to track dropouts and return them to school.

“Sometimes we use force and actually chase them down and throw them into the vehicle and take them to school. That is the common drill in RADs [Rural Administration Districts] whenever schools reopen. The problem is that most of these children will stay away from school unless they are made to attend,” explained a social worker in Gantsi.

Speaking to Okavango Voice this week, former Member of Parliament (MP) for Gantsi North, Noah Salakae, outlined what he believes the main problem is.

“Generally intake in these schools are Basarwa and these are the kind of people who are timid. Basarwa as a tribe value happiness; so when a teacher shouts at them they get scared because they are not used to a hostile environment and they would rather run from school,” reasoned the young legislator, who lost the constituency in last year’s general elections.

Salakae stressed that it is not that these children and their parents do not value education, but their epicentre is happiness.

Schools in Gantsi, Kgalagadi and Ngamiland area are often referred to as a failing belt and regularly produce poor end-of-year results. According to the ministry, most parents in these areas live away from their children. Some work in farms or in the delta and thus children have to stay in boarding schools because their villages have no schools.

These children often sneak out of school to follow their parents at the farms and settlements never to return to school again.